From the Archives of an Inventor

Invention and America seem inseparable. The country has a restless image of itself as a work in progress; and the character at its core is the inventor — equal parts entrepreneur and crackpot, path-setter and outsider. Wetzel's piece is a found-footage exploration of one such character, a Midwestern inventor whose house has been transformed into a playful model of the future with mechanized armchairs and a domestic robot.